


from ashes

by dellaluce



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, crapsack timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-18
Updated: 2010-08-18
Packaged: 2017-10-11 03:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/107953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dellaluce/pseuds/dellaluce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>phoe•nix - n. - see also: resurrection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	from ashes

“Don't do it,” the Seer demands _(wishes, hopes, pleads)_. There is something of the sun in him, shining through collapse; carbon and oxygen, brighter as he folds, as he burns himself away. She sees so far into him that it hurts her eyes, until she closes them. “I know what you're going to do.”

The Knight stretches his arms out along the railing, leans back, tilts his head to the sky, and grins. _(brighter as he folds)_ “Glad one of us does.”

There is something of the bird in him, the way his bones line up in streamlined angles, the way muscle and sinew tangles over them. He is awkward and unwieldy, growing out of order the way boys do; he is awkward and unwieldy and he doesn't know what to do with himself, so out of his own element. _(it has to be that way, when his element is fire and fire will take him whether he wants it to or not) _

There is something of the sun and of the bird, and she is afraid for him. She won't be there to see what happens when sun and bird meet for the first time, for the last time, but she knows how the story ends.

_(wax and wings and all those pretty feathers, burned to cinders)_

“You won't come back the same.”

She watches him out of the corner of her eyes, hurting to look at him. She watches him run a finger along vinyl, appraising, appreciating, as though it's the last time he'll ever feel it and he wants to savor what he can, while he can.

“Shit,” he laughs, empty, shrugging. “Neither will you.”

_(she holds his hand, as they step into the pyre)_

(she sleeps and never wakes)

(he wakes and never sleeps)

\---

For a moment, he is outside of Time; and when he is outside of Time, the moment stretches, warps, bends around him, a kiss of eternity in a thousandth of a second. He is outside of Time and he is Time and Time cradles him, even as he breaks it, even as he breaks away from it, as he shifts and changes, shrinks and grows, melts and folds and melts and folds like shaping metal.

_(they see themselves in each other but they are not each other anymore)_

**_you won't come back the same,_** a voice smudges at the edge of his consciousness like rubbing at charcoal and india ink, a voice that was his voice when he used to have one. He sinks into drowning, into burning; fire takes his skin and melts it into wax, and wax melts into feathers, bird and sun and Time at once. He gasps with the pain, gasps for air and breathes in mercury and bromine, silver-orange, rich and sick, fire in his lungs.

**_good,_** he says, new voice slick and cavernous and caught on the edge of human.  
_  
(he smirks as he talks because he is light and he is lighter as he shifts the burden along)_

His chest is a hole and he bleeds himself out, bleeds out feeling and oxygen and carbon, fills himself back up with sticky slithering silver-orange; bones snap like songbirds, redesign, realign, reform, locking in place, molten, golden, burning, cooling.

**_will you miss it?_** Time hums and shudders like a music box melody as it leaves him, as it's replaced by everything, by everyone, by all the things he could've been and almost was and never will be: _the fire and fire and fire of phaeton, of helios, of apollo; the fire and wind and water of icarus; the fire and earth of hephaestus._ He is stitched together with bits of them, with bits of Seer and Heir and Witch, because they need him and he needs them and he needs to be what they need him to be.

**_will i?_** He knows everything now and he knows the answer to that question, to all the questions that could ever be asked, and it makes the blade in his heart ache because the heart can't ache anymore, not when it doesn't beat. It ticks like clockwork and the clockwork pumps mercury and bromine, fills his veins with alchemy and chemicals that burn like fire but aren't. Fire is real and he is not.

_(he kneels, sets before the real knight, the new knight, the old knight, an offering; and then he takes a leap of faith, he flies for the sun)_

_ **no.** _

_(and he dies)_

And he lives, because there is something of the bird in him; something of the sun, shining through collapse.


End file.
